1. Financial Management: As a creative, you need to manage your finances effectively. Bookkeeping helps you keep track of your income and expenses, allowing you to understand your cash flow, plan for taxes, and make informed financial decisions. It provides a clear picture of your financial health and helps you stay financially organized.
   
2. Tax Compliance: Proper bookkeeping ensures that you are accurately recording your income and expenses, which is crucial for fulfilling your tax obligations. By maintaining well-organized financial records, you can easily determine deductible expenses, prepare your tax returns, and minimize the chances of errors or discrepancies. This helps you avoid penalties, audits, and other tax-related issues (all the scary things business owner's dread!).
   
3. Budgeting and Planning: Creatives often have inconsistent income. Bookkeeping helps you track your earnings and expenses over time, allowing you to understand your financial patterns That way you can anticipate periods of higher or lower income, and save for lean times when business is booming.
   
4. Profitability Analysis: Bookkeeping provides insights into the profitability of your creative endeavors. By tracking your income and expenses on a project-by-project basis, you can determine which projects are most lucrative and identify areas where you can improve profitability. This information helps you make strategic decisions about pricing and client selection.
   
5. Professionalism and Credibility: Maintaining proper bookkeeping practices demonstrates professionalism and reliability to clients, collaborators, and potential business partners. When you send a professional invoice via QBO or Honeybook for example, it enhances your credibility and reputation, showing that you take your financial responsibilities seriously.
   

Overall, bookkeeping allows creatives to effectively manage their finances, comply with tax regulations, plan for the future, analyze profitability, and maintain professionalism. It is a key for you to succeed as a creative business owner.

It's no secret that I'm a big fan of QuickBooks Online. Since day one I've exclusively worked with QBO to help my clients track and understand their numbers. Here are a few reasons it works for business owners, even if you're a DIY bookkeeper:

• No more manual entry! Easily connect your bank accounts and credit cards so nothing gets missed.
• Track your income and expenses in one place simplifying your business finance routine
• Be tax time ready -- say goodbye to late night struggles trying to gather numbers for your tax accountant.
• It integrates with popular platforms like Dubsado and Honeybook so you don't need to change your workflow.
• Get real-time insights on how your business is doing financially. No more wondering how much money you made last month.

Whether your business is just starting out and you need to send your first invoice or you’re an established business and are looking for more insights to grow, QuickBooks has the tools to support your business growth.

Finances can get messy quickly. You don't have to pretend you have everything together––I've seen my fair share of bookkeeping messes (and just so you know I LOVE cleaning up bookkeeping messes, so send them my way judgment-free!).

There are six practical steps you can take to get your on the right financial path:

• Get caught up with your bookkeeping
• Review your profit and loss statement
• Hire a Certified Public Accountant (or Enrolled Agent) to file your taxes
• Prepare for 1099 season now
• Set financial goals for the year
• Schedule a date to renew your LLC in your state

These tried and true tips are for useful for any stage of business (because business = money to keep track of, whether it is little or much). I've used them in my business, to help my clients, and now I want to pass them on to you.